Category: Powershell

Jana Sattainathan shows how to open a specific Powershell ISE tab without moving your hands off the keyboard:

This is a function that activates a tab based on a partial search string that you type in the CLI portion of the ISE. Among the numerous tabs you have open in the ISE, to activate a tab that has the word “register”, you would just type in

1	popt register

That’s it. The tab that has the word “register” will become active.

Why “popt” instead of a standard name?

“popt” is the alias you can create for the real “search and activate function” Pop-FileInISETab. It stands for “poptab”. You don’t want to trade one problem with another by having to type that long name, so, there is functionality to optionally create an alias named “popt” for the function.

At first I said to myself, “Why would anybody have this many tabs open?”  Then I looked at my instance of SQL Server Management Studio.  Then I decided I wanted this for SSMS.

Sander Stad has made changes to his Export-DMVInformation Powershell module:

Changes:

1. Possibility to execute the module using the pipeline

2. Get all the databases in one statement by assigning the value “ALL” to the database parameter.

3. Replaced messages with verbose

Read on for more information, including where you can get the module and its Export-DMVInformation cmdlet.

Jana Sattainathan gives a few options for getting around hard-coded paths in a Powershell script:

What if the KillerApp’s home folder suddenly moves?

Now, how do you make your app work with all its scripts without having to change code if you move it to a different folder?

You could now change the initial script that that dot-sources all the functions to alter the path and you are all set. This is still not ideal because you have to make a change when the location changed.

Click through for several options, including PSDrives and even automatically dot-sourcing Powershell scripts in the current and all child directories.

Stuart Moore has a regex which looks for Powershell cmdlets used in a script:

Having had a quick bingle around for a prewritten regex example I didn’t come up with much that fitted the bill. So in the hope that this will help the next person trying to do this here they are:

Assumptions:

• A PowerShell function name is of the form Word-Word

• A PowerShell function definition is of the form “Function Word-Word”

• A Powershell function call can be preceeded by a ‘|’,'(‘, or ‘ ‘

• The script is written using a reasonable style, so there is a ‘ ‘ post call

Click through for the script.

Grant Fritchey wrote a Powershell script to export query plans from the plan cache into a .sqlplan file:

I’ve gone minimal on the script. I’m creating a connection to the local instance, defining a command, and returning the data into a data set. From there, since the data set consists of a single column, I’m walking through them all to export out to a file:

It’s Powershell, so it’s a short snippet.

Michael Sorens has some time-saving defaults for Powershell:

Besides setting up some convenient shortcuts for use with built-in cmdlets, for developers it is also handy to be able to work some magic with your own custom cmdlets. In my shop, for example, we have one module containing a couple dozen cmdlets, many of which use a common parameter, Mode. This Mode parameter varies from client to client, but for any single client, every cmdlet working on their data needs to use the same value of Mode. So I have to add -Mode hist-0010-dev.test onto each cmdlet I am using, which gets very tiring/annoying very quickly. You could, of course, put that value into a variable and then just use, e .g. -Mode $myMode, which is less typing, but if less is better, then no typing at all is better still.

There are a lot of tips in this article, so take some time with it.